Confirmed? 2018 iPad Pro Ditches Home Button, Gains Face ID

It’s pretty safe to say that we’ll be getting a new 2018 iPad Pro this year. Chances are that it’ll arrive some time this fall and it won’t reinvent the Apple tablet formula too much. However, there is no further evidence that at least one iconic feature will be courageously removed: the home button.

We had already heard rumors about some of these upcoming changes to the 2018 iPad Pro. We’ve already heard that the headphone jack will be sent out to pasture and that the smart connector could be moving to the bottom for a more portrait-oriented experience.

And we’re getting thinner bezels too, including the removal of the home button at the bottom. This will borrow much of the aesthetic started by the iPhone X, though it’s not 100 percent certain at this point whether they’ll be a notch. But there will be Face ID.

Developer Guilherme Rambo of 9to5Mac spotted something as he was going through the iOS 12 developer beta 5. And that something is a new asset that seems to depict the new 2018 iPad Pro sans bezels and without a home button. This glyph also shows the new iPad without a notch, so we can take that how we will.

Digging through the Accessibility Settings for the new iPad Pro (J3xx), Rambo also discovers code that effectively confirms the presence of Face ID. This makes perfect sense if the home button and Touch ID are going to be eliminated.

Of course, the 2018 iPad Pro isn’t the only tablet that’s getting rid of home buttons like they’re yesterday’s news. In yesterday’s news, we saw that the new Galaxy Tab S4 from Samsung has also removed the home button in favor of thinner bezels. Authentication options there include the iris and facial scanner, as well as the usual lock code.